第181页
《简·爱(英文版)》章节:第181页,宠文网网友提供全文无弹窗免费在线阅读。!
seek a retirement where punctual habits would be permanently secured
from disturbance, and place safe barriers between herself and a
frivolous world. I asked if Georgiana would accompany her.
'Of course not. Georgiana and she had nothing in common: they never
had had. She would not be burdened with her society for any
consideration. Georgiana should take her own course; and she, Eliza,
would take hers.'
Georgiana, when not unburdening her heart to me, spent most of
her time in lying on the sofa, fretting about the dulness of the
house, and wishing over and over again that her aunt Gibson would send
her an invitation up to town. 'It would be so much better,' she
said, 'if she could only get out of the way for a month or two, till
all was over.' I did not ask what she meant by 'all being over,' but I
suppose she referred to the expected decease of her mother and the
gloomy sequel of funeral rites. Eliza generally took no more notice of
her sister's indolence and complaints than if no such murmuring,
lounging object had been before her. One day, however, as she put away
her account-book and unfolded her embroidery, she suddenly took her up
thus-
'Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you was certainly
never allowed to cumber the earth. You had no right to be born, for
you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself,
as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness
on some other person's strength: if no one can be found willing to
burden her or himself with such a fat, weak, puffy, useless thing, you
cry out that you are ill-treated, neglected, miserable. Then, too,
existence for you must be a scene of continual change and
excitement, or else the world is a dungeon: you must be admired, you
must be courted, you must be flattered- you must have music,
dancing, and society- or you languish, you die away. Have you no sense
to devise a system which will make you independent of all efforts, and
all wills, but your own? Take one day; share it into sections; to each
section apportion its task: leave no stray unemployed quarters of an
hour, ten minutes, five minutes- include all; do each piece of
business in its turn with method, with rigid regularity. The day
will close almost before you are aware it has begun; and you are
indebted to no one for helping you to get rid of one vacant moment:
you have had to seek no one's company, conversation, sympathy
forbearance; you have lived, in short, as an independent being ought
to do. Take this advice: the first and last I shall offer you; then
you will not want me or any one else, happen what may. Neglect it-
go on as heretofore, craving, whining, and idling- and suffer the
results of your idiocy, however bad and insufferable they may be. I
tell you this plainly; and listen: for though I shall no more repeat
what I am now about to say, I shall steadily act on it. After my